Hi all – I’m coming back to China for a visit from the beginning of June. I will spend some time in Beijing and it would be great to see you if you are there. I am thinking of visiting CUPL one day. Send me an email if you’re going to be around and maybe we can arrange to meet up. Jon

Welcome to my English language and culture blog. This blog originated as a resource for students of my English writing and contemporary British culture courses. I ran these courses at the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) in 2007. I hope the material available here will be useful to other students of English too. Please do leave a comment and let me know what you think of the site. Best wishes, Jon

The first part of the examination will be this Wednesday, as I explained in the last class. Just to remind you, I expect to see that you have chosen a question from the list of questions (see the last post), that you have done some independent research (you can show me your notes to demonstrate this), that you have brainstormed to generate diverse ideas (again, I expect to see notes to show this), that you have chosen a central claim for your essay and that you have begun to plan it.

In order to be very clear then, what you need to show me in the class on Wednesday is the following. Please bring everything to class. You do not need to hand it in, but I want to see it and to discuss it with each one of you.

We’re getting near the end of the course, so I think it’s time to begin talking about assessment. I’m not going to set you exams, instead I’m going to ask you to write an essay – or tw essays if you are following both the writing and the Blair’s Britain courses.

I’m going to give you a wide choice of questions – you can see them here:

I’m afraid the BBC interview with the rabbi and the bishop that we listened to last week will have been taken down now – they only leave their radio programmes online for one week. Sorry I didn’t get around to putting up a link earlier. However, you can find plenty of news stories related to the subject of faith schools on the Guardian newspaper website which has special sections on religion in Britain and on education:

In the last writing class we looked at claims and found that there are at least three different kinds of claims:

Factual claims

Value claims

Policy claims

These three different claims require different kinds of evidence and it is important that you recognise which kind of claim you are making in an essay so you can make sure that the evidence you supply is appropriate. If you are making a factual claim you will need to supply factual evidence and you will need to evaluate the reliability or trustworthiness of that evidence. If you are making a value claim, in order to make an argument, you will have to begin by supplying other criteria by which to judge the values you are arguing for. If you are making a policy claim, you will have to combine agruments about values (which outcomes are desirable?) with arguments about facts (what policies will in practice produce the desired outcomes?).

In tomorrow’s class we will discuss what makes a good claim. You can see material for last week’s class and for tomorrow’s at: